Ep. 3002: The Collapse of Jaguar, Meta Buying OpenAI, AI Mode vs. Search, ChatGPT 5 Hype

Can we just talk about the collapse of Jaguar? What, the, the 93% sales volume went down?

No.

You didn't read about this?

No, I didn't see it.

Do you live under a rock or something?

It wasn't posted on the sites that I read frequently, like CNBC.

Oh, right.

All right.

So, okay. Jaguar's April 2025 Europe sales plunged 97.5% from 1,961 units to just 49 vehicles, marking a near total collapse during this rebranding phase. BMW, Mercedes, and Audi each retained market stability, selling approximately 50,000 to 75,000 units in April 2025 across Europe. You know what?

That's what they get. And you know the marketing? Oh, we stand by it. And like, no one cares.

Guys, people are over that.

Enough.

Yeah. Enough.

It's a car company.

Yeah.

Just show us car stuff.

Yeah.

It's not a fashion show.

Yeah. This is reverse spectacle marketing. This is what— so you pay the price sometimes. And I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm just gonna call out too, like Bud Light, same thing.

You got to know your core audience. And Eric and I, for the record, are not against people deciding what they want with their lives.

They can do whatever they want with their lives.

What they want with their lives. And we're not saying that's bad or anything like that. But what we're saying is, if you have a car company, focus your marketing on creating cars. It should not get to be something that's more political or something that is Trendsetting or something that is more about talking to culture when it has nothing to do with your product or service. It's like, we're a marketing agency. We produce stats and data about marketing. We focus on our tools. I don't go talk about cars or fashion or things that are not related or dentistry. I know that's just random topics, but that's in essence what Jaguar did. They had a fashion show. with people and different outfits. If, correct me if I'm wrong, the last I recall had nothing to do with their car.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what the heck is this? And you want to be in fashion and do that? You want to be Dolce Gabbana? Go for it. Yep. I don't care. And that probably would help you generate more sales. That makes sense to me. But if you're a car company, why are you focusing on fashion? People want to see what new car you have to release. They don't care about fashion.

You don't want to alienate your core customers. You look at your data. If you look at Bud Light or if you look at Jaguar, who, who is your core customer? What is their net worth? Where do they live? What kind of people are these people? You want to market to those people. When we create this content, we are marketing. We are trying to teach people what the marketing experiments that we're running. You're trying to give them data. You're trying to basically help people get better at marketing. And if they need help with it, great. They can work with you, right? That's just how it is.

Yes. And again, for the record, to clarify, Eric and I don't discriminate. In both our companies, we have, Eric has less people. I don't mean that in a bad way. So, you know, just he may not have everyone because we have quite a bit of people, 1,000-ish plus or whatever it may be. But we both hire people who are LGBTQ+.

Yeah.

Right? And Eric can have no issues with it. And some of those people are our best employees and they're great at what they do. It's more so, Your product is your product. Your core audience is your core audience. You got to stick with the mission. Don't derail because the moment you derail, you can lose a lot of money. And Harley is a great example of this. Do you remember Harley?

Did they derail?

Well, they started focusing more on their core audience and it's helped their sales from the last I checked. And this was like a year and a half ago.

When something's working, double down.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's no need to try to do all these cute things. And you learn this as you get older.

And it doesn't mean that other people can't use your products. Like, I have a good friend, he's gay, love him to death. I've known him for 14, 15 years.

Mm-hmm.

He has a Harley, not like the Harley you would think. Harley has quite a bit of different, what is it called? Models, right? But like Harley didn't alienate him. They focused their marketing on the core, you know, people call it like the 5% of the population or 2% of the population that is the majority end user that buys their product, it doesn't mean that the other people can't buy their product. You just want to focus your marketing dollars on your ideal customer profile.

Yep, 100%. By the way, I want to talk about how Meta is basically buying OpenAI right in front of us. So this is people you've definitely heard about. Yeah. So when he's offering, when Mark Zuckerberg's offering $100 million to $300 million comp package, like you're going to, I don't, You know, Sam Altman talks about, oh, you know, we want missionaries versus mercenaries.

And he says, none of our good people have left. I call bull.

At the end of the day, people care about taking care of their family and themselves. And so no missionary mercenary, please. So Meta is like, the fact that they acquired Scale for $14.9 billion or like a big chunk of it, and Alexander Wang is leading this new smart— is it smart intelligence or something intelligence division? And now he has all these OpenAI people. The thing is Meta can't afford to fall behind in this race, because if their ads can be 10x better, 10x more personalized or whatever, they're going to make a lot more money. He cannot afford to lose that. And if there's anything Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has been good at, it has been buying companies, not necessarily innovating, but always buying companies.

He's been good at buying. WhatsApp, Instagram, WhatsApp were amazing purchases. And he doesn't buy a lot, but when he buys, you know, even Oculus, I do think that was a good company.

I think Oculus will work out over time because the glasses will work out. Yeah. And now he's partnered up with Anduro again, like Palmer Luckey. So he fired him, but then now they're friends again. Right. But my point is, Like, this is interesting because Meta's doubling down on where they think things should be, where they think things will be going. And he's not afraid to take these big bets. And actually, in hindsight, if you look at how much money they make a year, it's really not that big of a bet to take on like an entire market, right? Yeah. So I think everything— or we know that whatever company you build comes down to the people that you have. And Mark Zuckerberg is betting on that.

Yes. Going back to Jaguar, dude, if I was Tata, because Tata acquired Jaguar and Range Rover, I'd be just so pissed right now.

I'm sure they are.

I'd be like, I just spent $1 billion or however many billions buying a company. And this cool marketing campaign that you guys thought was cool just lost me, call it, you know, X billions of dollars. I would just be pissed.

This is where marketing could go wrong. So yeah. Yeah.

All right.

You pick one. We picked a bunch of mine.

Where was one? You had something on data from, uh, IpoRank.

Mine's pretty good, huh? Yeah.

I was actually curious on this AI mode versus classic search data.

Yeah. I threw this in this morning. So Okay, so Mike King from iPollRank. So he says this, we got some early data from SimilarWeb on user behavior in AI mode versus classic search, 100K users from May 20th, 2025 to June 19th, 2025. So although user adoption is low, only 2%, early patterns are emerging. So the disparity in referral traffic between the 2 channels is immense, but the average page views for referral traffic from AI mode is higher than that of classical search and it's climbing rapidly.

So yeah, AMO referral gap that we already figured. Okay. What was the other one? The page views? Does he have a page view chart for traditional? Oh, AMO, he does. Where's the other one?

Google search is in brown here. You can't even see it. It doesn't even register. So referral pages, you're getting way more in AI mode, it seems like. So it's so low.

It's not even on the graph.

It doesn't even register. Yeah. And look, it's all the way down here. 5% percentage of searches. Resulting in external clicks. So AI mode does not yield external clicks, 5%, and then 25% from traditional Google search.

But when you're getting the page views, it's drastically more. So similar to ChatGPT where it's like when they come to your website, they're ready to buy. So the conversion data is probably going to be much higher.

Yeah, they've spent more time researching, so that makes sense.

Yes. Yeah, they've researched on platform versus researching on your website.

Yeah. So that's interesting. Yeah.

Speaking of AI, I honestly think ChatGPT has won the AI battle even though it's just started.

Okay, go on.

When companies will integrate AI into their products, AI is here to stay. And I think there's going to be a lot of companies who leverage AI and they'll make a ton of money, billions of dollars, potentially even trillions off of it. But when you think about from a usage perspective, the consumer, no matter where you go in this world, 'Cause I speak everywhere, like I'm speaking out, I fly to Hong Kong in a few days. Everyone tells me, oh yeah, AI, ChatGPT. You go around the airport, you hear people talking about AI, they all talk about ChatGPT. Even when they're using the AI on Google, 'cause I've been in conversations about this, Mm-hmm. a lot of the people in the older generations, they think Google AI is ChatGPT. And ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI. Would you agree with this?

Yeah.

I think they've won the brand game. I'm not saying they'll have the best product, but they've already won and they're going to be a big company and they're here to stay and they'll control massive market share.

So there's a couple things here. In business, we call this the first mover advantage. So Coca-Cola was first, right? And so it doesn't always work like Google. Google as a search engine came way later, but first mover, sometimes it does work. In this case, ChatGPT, the reason why, I'm gonna give a couple real reasons here in terms of like experiences. So they were first to market and then they had a head start like a couple months.

Well, they weren't first mover.

Google had.

Google had people on there.

Yeah, but they never released like a chat interface type of thing.

Correct, they were too slow.

Yeah, so my point is with ChatGPT, what's special about it right now is it has memory where I don't need to, that is building a moat around it where I don't feel the need to switch. But the other crazy thing too is that the reasoning models are better than the other models that I've used. And so I actually, this will be interesting to you, I've been doing this since 2014 or so. So I read a book from Peter Drucker a long time ago called Managing Oneself. It's like a short 50-page thing, right? And Peter Drucker writes all these executive leadership books, right? The whole point in that book is, okay, you should—

He's still around or he passed away?

I think he passed, yeah. So you should be doing feedback analysis. I'm sure you think about like, what are all the big decisions you make and what happened with them, right? So I had this document from 2014. I uploaded this document to ChatGPT. I was like, hey, tell me where I'm top 1% as an entrepreneur, but also tell me where I'm bottom 1% as an entrepreneur, right? And it gives it— I use the O3 Pro model and I uploaded my thing. And so this combination is like a super assistant and it's like delegation governance. What drags it to the cellar? Taking too long to move on from people. The acquisitions that you make, the operator handoff over here, it shows the same flaw. You step away before KPIs, owner, and 90-day charter are locked. So few elite founders let gaps like this persist, right? And so it starts naming all these weaknesses. The strengths are great too. But my point of saying this is I can't do this with something else. And so they're ahead of the curve right now. And you got ChatGPT-5 coming in July. And Kieran Flanagan wrote this out. It's not just ChatGPT anymore, it's AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. We'll see about that.

But— So they're saying it's a big—

It's a big launch. That's why they've been pushing it out and it's coming this month. But it's a unified model that can think, reason, create, and execute across domains. There's— that means no more dropdown menus with new Numerous model names, and it's smarter than human experts, PhD level. It'll multitask for you, edit videos, transcripts, analyze data, research. It's an AI operating system. So my point is, who cares about all these features I'm talking about? They're just ahead right now.

They're ahead, they're moving fast. I do think Grok is also moving quite quickly.

You like Grok?

Yeah, but it's just not as good from what I've used and tested. Some people believe it is, but I—

It's fun when you see people using Grok to respond to like politicians' tweets.

Yes.

Hey Grok, is this true? And it's like, no, this is not true. Yeah.

Yeah. But for me, you know, I think the real 2 winners in this AI landscape is going to be ChatGPT.

Can you guess the second one? Google.

Yes, Google.

Yeah.

And I think Google will still control majority of the market share.

If I were to buy stocks, not financial advice, over the next 10 years, I would buy Google because they have Waymo, they have all the data that they have, they have YouTube, right? They have quantum computing coming. I would buy Microsoft just because enterprise. I would buy Nvidia. I buy Bitcoin and then I had a— and Tesla because they have robots and robotaxis. I would just sit it on those 5 and just leave it there.

And I believe Google from the articles I've read, and I could be off, maybe they're just getting more press. It looks like they're ahead on quantum computing over everyone else.

And plus, by the way, when you have Google and you have Microsoft, you have cloud, right? Because their Azure and then their Google Cloud divisions are growing. What would you buy? You just buy it and leave it there for 10 years.

I would buy Google. I would buy Facebook.

Okay.

I would not buy Tesla. I do believe Tesla will do really well in the future. I just believe Elon Musk's personality is getting away, is getting in the way of their financial performance. And that's going to affect people even purchasing their products. I think a lot of people, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, and I'm not saying this is my opinion, but if you just look, there's a lot of people who won't buy Teslas anymore because of all the political stuff.

Remember what you said earlier though? The product, right? I feel like the products are going to be so good that he's going to overcast over everything else. And he's, I think he, I hope, actually I don't think he's going to change, but like—

I don't think he's going to change. That's my problem with him because you're saying I can't sell over the next 10 years.

Yeah.

Like I actually think Apple's going to be a huge winner in hardware.

Really?

Okay.

So, okay. So what would be the 5 things that you would buy? Google?

This is not financial advice.

Yeah, not financial advice.

Google. Facebook or Meta, whatever you want to end up calling it, because they just control so much inventory and everything is still going very heavily social. Google, uh, Facebook, uh, Google, Facebook, Apple. I think from a hardware perspective, I don't think Apple's going to win the software race. If you ever looked at Apple software, it's never been revolutionary, like, oh my God, this is the best software.

I like the ecosystem lock-in though.

The ecosystem lock-in is amazing. And what Apple does extremely well, that's better than most people and better than Tesla, their hardware is more usable. I had a Tesla car for like a month. The screen was in the middle. It's like you're driving and your speed is in the middle right. And I'm trying to look at the road. I'm like, why do I have to look at the right to see my speed of the car? Because the monitor is in the, in the middle.

Oh, for Model 3?

For Model 3. That is not the most usable thing. And there's a lot of other usability issues with Teslas, like You sit in the car for a long time, the seat, at least in a Model 3, it hurts. It is not comfortable like a Mercedes or anything like that.

It's not quite nice as like a Maybach.

Okay. Even your Porsche. Right. And, and, and Tesla for being around a number of years, they haven't figured out usability really well and comfort.

But finish, wait, 4 and 5.

Okay. So, um, if I had to pick 4 and 5, I would pick Microsoft.

Okay.

I think they just control so much of the ecosystem in B2B.

Yeah.

I think people are just stuck on there and they've made amazing investments over time. You know, people don't realize this. They saved Apple and they made money on Apple stock because they gave them $100 billion.

Got OpenAI.

OpenAI.

Remember they bought Xbox? Wait, no, no, they didn't buy Xbox.

They didn't buy Xbox. That gaming company, I thought it was a smart move.

They bought Minecraft. I think Roblox, Minecraft, Minecraft, one of those, which has done really well.

They bought the other gaming company that you play, that you hit people, that game where you hit people.

You hit people in a lot of games.

The one in Orange County. What is that called? It's big. Blizzard, Blizzard, Blizzard.

They bought Blizzard. Oh, Activision Blizzard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's owned by them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

They've Facebook. They were one of the earlier investors in Facebook. They made a killing from that stock.

Yeah. They've done great. I'm, I'm, Satya is a pretty impressive guy. Um, and like cloud has done really well for them too. Okay. So, okay.

That's 4.

What's the 5th one? What's the 5th one?

The 5th one, if I had to pick, would be Amazon.

Okay.

I don't think Amazon's doing really well in the AI world from like their cloud and AWS. Amazon has won the mindshare when it comes to just buying stuff online and how they're trying to do delivery and just get it within an hour and right away for you. And their network, they're spending more on their network for delivery than probably UPS, FedEx, and the United Postal Service is spending all combined. I think that's how you're going to get everything and it's going to be instant. But those are the companies I would bet on.

And by the way, guys, again, not financial advice, but the way Neil and I look at this is business would be number one because you can actually control the compounding of that and usually you're not going to get a better return in your business. Yeah, but then if we were to be safe and just leave it locked in for 10 years, we're roughly looking at things 60% similar, but it is mostly tech for both of us.

So yeah, I don't really invest outside of tech.

Yeah, but it's also because we want what we understand because I was talking to my dad yesterday. He's like, oh, I like I was like, tell me why you like Pfizer. He couldn't explain it, right? He's like, yeah, well, they have 5 new products coming out. I was like, tell me one of the new products. He's like, I can't, right? And I was like, okay, so why do you like— he's like, well, I tell you, I have one rule. I always sell if it goes down 30%. So I was like, okay, so you would sell Amazon and Apple if it just went down 30%? And so it's like most people— and sorry, Dad, this is— I'm just saying that most people, for the most part, they haven't really thought about their investment thesis. And this gives you a chance to think about it. Again, not financial advice, but We want you all to do well.

So yeah. And I just look at like what we would use 5 to 10 years from now. And I don't look at it at the price.

We buy what we understand. We invest in what we understand.

Yes. And I agree with you on Tesla. I think the company will do really well. Now, if you said Starlink, which, cause it's not public, I would have picked Starlink in there.

The return's insane. Yeah.

Forget the return. I think that is the future. I would have put Starlink probably at the top.

I would do Starlink and SpaceX if we can get it. Oh, SpaceX is a little expensive.

No, Starlink is SpaceX.

Yeah, but didn't they talk about separating it?

Uh, no, when I, uh, I didn't see that, but when I said Starlink, I actually meant SpaceX, the company.

Yeah. I would, I mean, absolutely. Like, dude, if I could do Anduril, the defense thing, I would consider it too. The Palmer Luckey one?

I, I wouldn't, and not because it's not an amazing company. I don't know much about defense.

Yeah.

Whether it's Palantir or that.

Yeah. I just don't know much about it. I don't even know what Palantir does, but, but their stock's through the roof.

Look at Peter Thiel's network.

So the thing is like, you know, Actually, Neil makes a good point, right? And then we can move on to more marketing stuff again. But Palantir, I don't understand, and it's rocketing. I do believe in stablecoins, so like USDC, and it's rocketing, right? But I don't understand it nearly as enough, one, about my business, two, about these, the main stocks that we just mentioned. We understand those a lot more because we pay for those things and we live in those ecosystems. Yes.

And normally I would have been like, Bitcoin is great, buy it too. Again, this is not financial advice, but the reason I didn't choose Bitcoin as one of them, I know you chose, If you look at the general market, when the, you know, because everyone's like, oh, if the economy or the world crashes, you have Bitcoin.

I don't believe that part.

I don't believe it anymore because when you look at the stock market and the political environment, when things go well, Bitcoin rises. When things go poorly, Bitcoin goes down.

It's not a hedge in my mind.

It's not a hedge anymore. It's owned by a lot of financial institutions that are holding it. And when things go bad, They sell off when things go well, they can buy more, and it just moves with the market from what I can at least see in the more recent times. You know, 10 years ago, that's a different story than it is today.

My thesis on the Bitcoin piece is just it's going to continue to compound. The big risk is quantum computing, maybe cracking it. But yeah, we'll see what happens. All right. That's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.